Slept nearly ten hours, and still haven't settled my REM overdraft. Day got out to a rather bad start on a number of fronts (bad weather, bad network, a couple of other things I wasn't expecting at all). Am trying to figure out what's happened, but it is likely to take a while.

More immediate issues: Service Pack 2, true to form, somehow crashed QEMU (and I'm not blaming the emulator). It's churning away in the background as I type this:

It is a testament to Fabrice's skills, however, that it recovered (already got it running again), and that it is very usable for simple tasks. I haven't installed Office yet (I am planning to restore a snapshot from my Windows partition), but have high hopes of this becoming the freeware VMware replacement as performance improves.

A hint: Moderate tweaking of video modes (setting everything to 16bit, host and guest alike) makes a lot of difference, since from what I could gather in the development mailing-list there are still some SDL optimizations to be done. Extra bleeding-edge folk will want to know there is an alternative accelerator, but I'm sticking to Ballard's for now.

(There are also optimizations on the Mac OS X port, but I'll wait until there is a pre-packaged build.)

In other news, Snakelets is now at 1.39, Safari 1.3 now supports inline HTML editing (hooray), XSLT and other niceties, and Beagle is turning out to be solid gold (even in its alpha state) - easily the best Gnome 2.10 goodie so far, and I've got it running on 2.8 as well.

Playtime's up - brought work home, got to finish it.

Minor Update: Left my Macs updating to 10.3.9 while working - after talking to Davi, who advised me to remove AcidSearch (which, incidentally, has been updated) and PithHelmet (updated too, thanks for the input). Witch (the only thing I wasn't quite sure about) still works, Mail.app 1.3.11 can still be tweaked to have a vertical preview pane, Safari feels noticeably faster (largely to it now displaying page contents sooner) - but on the third click, crashed on me for the first time in months. Must investigate later, but so far, so good.